Swartz supporter dumps 18,592 JSTOR docs on the Pirate Bay

In the wake of Tuesday's arrest of Internet activist Aaron Swartz for …

A 31-year-old American who says his name is Gregory Maxwell has posted a 32GB file containing 18,592 scientific articles to BitTorrent. In a lengthy statement posted to the Pirate Bay, he says that Tuesday's arrest of onetime Reddit co-owner Aaron Swartz inspired the document release.

"All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge—as their lofty mission statements suggest—but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does," he wrote.

Maxwell says he is a technologist living in the Washginton, DC area. He tells Ars that "I'm not an academic, but I sometimes play one on the Internet. I am a hobbyist scientist and many of the things I work on leave me often consuming scientific papers."

He rarely has trouble gaining access to the documents he needs because "my social circle is stuffed full of academics." But he worries that others who aren't as well connected will have trouble getting access to academic research.

It's safe to say that Swartz would approve of Maxwell's actions. In a 2008 "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto" first reported by the New York Times, Swartz wrote that "we need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks."

Maxwell says the documents he released were all published before 1923, which means that they should be in the public domain under US copyright law. He says he acquired the documents through "rather boring and lawful means," and wanted to publish them on a public site such as Wikisource. However, he worried that incumbent publishers would "claim that their slavish reproduction—scanning the documents—created a new copyright interest."

So for "a long time," Maxwell opted not to publish the documents. But now, in the wake of Swartz's arrest, Maxwell says he feels that was the wrong decision.

"If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified—it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge."

Swartz and Maxwell's actions are part of a broader campaign to open up public access to academic work. In February, the prominent computer security researcher Matt Blaze blasted ACM and IEEE, the two most important professional societies in his profession, for restrictive copyright policies.

"I will no longer serve as a program chair, program committee member, editorial board member, referee or reviewer for any conference or journal that does not make its papers freely available on the Web or at least allow authors to do so themselves," Blaze wrote. He called on his fellow academics to join him. Ironically, the faculty of MIT—where Swartz allegedly did his downloading—made a similar pledge in 2009.

Timothy B. Lee
Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times. Emailtimothy.lee@arstechnica.com//Twitter@binarybits

Good. Scientific research, especially old scientific research needs to be available to the public. If they must restrict access for a year or two to recoup some costs, then fine, but they should be freely available after that, and journals should never be run as a profit making enterprise.

Good. Scientific research, especially old scientific research needs to be available to the public. If they must restrict access for a year or two to recoup some costs, then fine, but they should be freely available after that, and journals should never be run as a profit making enterprise.

You mean they should be free?.Well I guess you better tell that to all the science mags.

Wait. I thought the official party line was he was simply doing research, but choose to leech from others while breaking and entering. But we were assured there was no intention to redistribute this information. So he really is a pathetic loser and theif who is just as creepy as he looks.

I want to see the surviellance tape of him putting a bike helment over his face. He needs some public mocking to go along with a paid vacation with his newest buddies, Butch and Tyrone.

Yes, everything should be free. Including whatever the guy does for a living who dumped the documents. Seriously, peer-reviewed journals actually do employ people to, you know, work. Authors do have to spend money occasionally for stuff, like food. Librarians are not all pro bono because they make so much money they feel like giving back.

Wait. I thought the official party line was he was simply doing research, but choose to leech from others while breaking and entering. But we were assured there was no intention to redistribute this information. So he really is a pathetic loser and theif who is just as creepy as he looks.

I want to see the surviellance tape of him putting a bike helment over his face. He needs some public mocking to go along with a paid vacation with his newest buddies, Butch and Tyrone.

Did you RTFA? The guy who released this had nothing to do with the whole Swartz sitation besides ideologically. And (at least according to him), they were all acquired legitimately over time - not the same files Swartz is accused of sneaking out. To top it off, their all supposedly pre-1923, putting them beyond copyright protection.

Edit: If your referring to the "Manifesto", it does seem to provide evidence of motivation to share the files, but it certainly doesn't prove that's what his aim was this time.

As a graduate student IEEE's policies seem completely unfair and borderline immoral. I, with the help and supervision of my adviser, create a document detailing work I have done. I am compensated for this work by the funding agency, usually some branch of the US government, and then I sign over copyright to IEEE and my grant pays them on the order of $1000 in publishing fees.

The paper is reviewed by others in my field who do not receive a paycheck from IEEE and then posted online where IEEE charges very high subscription or per use fees.

I think that my work should not be subject to copyright but should instead be considered a work of the US government, they paid for it after all. But at the very least my institution or adviser should retain copyright. Where does all this money that IEEE receives go, and what have they done to deserve it?

Yes, everything should be free. Including whatever the guy does for a living who dumped the documents. Seriously, peer-reviewed journals actually do employ people to, you know, work. Authors do have to spend money occasionally for stuff, like food. Librarians are not all pro bono because they make so much money they feel like giving back.

Exactly, except for the fact that the stuff written is old enough to be in the public domain. This is the way that Swartz should have proceeded. Obtaining documents that ought to be PD through legal access methods before providing them to the public.

What remains to be seen is whether or not these materials actually are considered PD by the copyright office, but this is a law issue, and legal issues take a long time. They also tend to be started by an act of infringement. To me, this seems like a novel way of bringing about a legal discussion without having to pay the lawyers yourself. If JSTOR wants to sue because they feel that they own the copyright by their "slavish reproduction," then that's their right under the law.

This action has the right set of circumstances to shape copyright law in a more productive direction. Breaking into a computer lab and accessing documents without proper rights to those documents does not.

While it's hard to argue against their cause, there's also the fact that research is an expensive undertaking, and if the sponsors of the research can make a bit of that money back by charging for access, that means more money for research becomes available in the future. I know, I know, these are idealists who have no concept of money and/or business.

EDIT: I should add that in this specific case, with documents prior to 1923, I see no wrong in this decision.

Wait. I thought the official party line was he was simply doing research, but choose to leech from others while breaking and entering. But we were assured there was no intention to redistribute this information. So he really is a pathetic loser and theif who is just as creepy as he looks.

I want to see the surviellance tape of him putting a bike helment over his face. He needs some public mocking to go along with a paid vacation with his newest buddies, Butch and Tyrone.

Wait. I thought the official party line was your type weer too busy baaaawwwing to use the internet?

that aside, he did say he intended to use them as research...into Open access, you illiterate. also [quote="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/reddit-founder-arrested-for-excessive-jstor-downloads.ars]JSTOR acknowledged that "we secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed."[/qutoe]

Are you really so mentally challenged that you cannot see the moral issue in certain parties taking public domain works, blocking everyone from looking at them(works of SCIENCE, goddamnit), xeroxing them, claiming copyright and charging obscene amounts of money to access?

Good. Scientific research, especially old scientific research needs to be available to the public. If they must restrict access for a year or two to recoup some costs, then fine, but they should be freely available after that, and journals should never be run as a profit making enterprise.

You mean they should be free?.Well I guess you better tell that to all the science mags.

Either you're being sarcastic or you didn't understand what Xavin said.

He was saying make them available to paying subscribers or institutions for a period. After that make them available to the general public without charging $30+ for a single article. It's not that publishers can't make some money ever, that's not reasonable either.

Scientific discovery does no good if people can't access it. You're looking at a huge chunk of money when one needs to read dozens of articles for a research project. Not everyone has the luxury of being at a school with a well funded library system.

You guys are right! Damn this liberal-hippy-pinko scumbag! That research done nearly 90 years ago deserves the same protection as a brand new work. Otherwise what incentive would the author have to continue doing scientific work? We all know scientists are in it for the bling and womens.

Sarcasm aside, there is a not so fine line between jailing works that by all rights should be in the public domain and trying to recoup money by charging access for a limited time. As a pseudo scientist (I did a lot of research in computer science in grad school and continue to do it both at work and as a hobby) I think that the copyright for scientific works should be between 5 and 10 years. Ostensibly, copyright was created to further the cause of science and technology, exactly how does sitting on that knowledge for the lifetime of the author plus a redwood tree helping with that?

While it's hard to argue against their cause, there's also the fact that research is an expensive undertaking, and if the sponsors of the research can make a bit of that money back by charging for access, that means more money for research becomes available in the future. I know, I know, these are idealists who have no concept of money and/or business.

The problem is, it's not the sponsors making the money. In fact, the sponsors pay money for the article to be in the journal.. For instance, my program at college is highly funded by NIOSH, but NIOSH won't see a dime of the money that the distributors of the article make.. In fact, publishing costs the researcher money, which often comes from the financial sponsor of the research.

While it's hard to argue against their cause, there's also the fact that research is an expensive undertaking, and if the sponsors of the research can make a bit of that money back by charging for access, that means more money for research becomes available in the future. I know, I know, these are idealists who have no concept of money and/or business.

If the researchers want to make a profit on their research, why am I as a tax payer on the hook for their salaries and research expenses? Is this just more of the public cost, private profit model America seems so infatuated with? I'd argue that paying for research through taxes and then having to pay again to access it is the example of bad business sense.

Even private universities are subsidized through Pell Grants and similar. Look, I've got no qualms with private individuals doing whatever they want with their research. But if you're supported by the tax payers, you owe them something in return. That's the basic concept of money: if I pay you to produce something, I deserve access to that whatever you produced.

Good. Scientific research, especially old scientific research needs to be available to the public. If they must restrict access for a year or two to recoup some costs, then fine, but they should be freely available after that, and journals should never be run as a profit making enterprise.

You mean they should be free?.Well I guess you better tell that to all the science mags.

Either you're being sarcastic or you didn't understand what Xavin said.

He was saying make them available to paying subscribers or institutions for a period. After that make them available to the general public without charging $30+ for a single article. It's not that publishers can't make some money ever, that's not reasonable either.

Scientific discovery does no good if people can't access it. You're looking at a huge chunk of money when one needs to read dozens of articles for a research project. Not everyone has the luxury of being at a school with a well funded library system.

I believe that Xavin and roken are talking about two different types of publications: Xavin was speaking of journals where peer reviewed scientific studies are printed, and roken was speaking of science magazines such as Discovery and Scientific American. Though I could be completely wrong on this assumption.

While it's hard to argue against their cause, there's also the fact that research is an expensive undertaking, and if the sponsors of the research can make a bit of that money back by charging for access, that means more money for research becomes available in the future. I know, I know, these are idealists who have no concept of money and/or business.

EDIT: I should add that in this specific case, with documents prior to 1923, I see no wrong in this decision.

For the most part the journal publishers are NOT the sponsors of the research.

Wait, really? You know for a fact that he's 31 years old, but you have doubts about his name? Come on.

Quote:

if the sponsors of the research can make a bit of that money back by charging for access

Paywall publishers like JSTOR and IEEE are not sponsors of research. They are bloodsucking leeches of research. The researchers pay THEM, not the other way around. And the researchers are frequently forced to give up their own copyrights for the privilege! You should read Greg Maxwell's detailed explanation attached to the pirate bay torrent file.

As a graduate student IEEE's policies seem completely unfair and borderline immoral. I, with the help and supervision of my adviser, create a document detailing work I have done. I am compensated for this work by the funding agency, usually some branch of the US government, and then I sign over copyright to IEEE and my grant pays them on the order of $1000 in publishing fees.

The paper is reviewed by others in my field who do not receive a paycheck from IEEE and then posted online where IEEE charges very high subscription or per use fees.

I think that my work should not be subject to copyright but should instead be considered a work of the US government, they paid for it after all. But at the very least my institution or adviser should retain copyright. Where does all this money that IEEE receives go, and what have they done to deserve it?

++

The people of the US paid for it, the people of the US should own it. I don't see how allowing organizations to charge for access to research material that was funded by the public for years and years helps to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

I think it's worth posting the message he attached to the torrent. Lot's of wise words there:

Quote:

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Societyand which should be available to everyone at no cost, but mosthave previously only been made available at high prices throughpaywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19USD per article, though some of the older ones are available ascheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one articleat a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you tolocate works by title, author, or publication date, and achecksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if Ipublished them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those whoprofit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US AttorneyGeneral's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papersfrom JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd system - the authors are not paid for theirwriting, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes theauthors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageouslyexpensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high accessfees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves littlesignificant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The"publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossiblyweak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminaryscholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, ratherthan the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. Theyare supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of theresources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may askfor alterations to the standard contract without risking their career onthe loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent towhich academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do theyrealize what sort of work is being done outside universities that wouldbenefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout neededto abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extendingit to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historicdocuments and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaidscientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for theirattacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright hasclassically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutionswith outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we giveup some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange forcreating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy moreworks. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they usethreats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publiclyowned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring andlawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of thePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - prestigious scientificjournal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones publishedprior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not availablefreely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month'sviewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them toWikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource, where theycould be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interestinghistorical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranuswas discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look atthe paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of theseveral follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens ofother papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigationfrom the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavishreproduction - scanning the documents - created a new copyrightinterest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivialwatermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. Theymight even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtainedthe files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to coverthe potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the onlyunlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR andthe Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which islegally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives, but "free"only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming notdisseminators of knowledge, as their lofty mission statementssuggest, but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thingthey do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation arevaluable functions, but their value is negative when there is only onesteward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final wordon what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have valuethey can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientificinquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictivecopyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky questionof how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already notpaying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal accessto scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continuedsurvival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonousindustry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified, it will be oneless dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spentlobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papersa crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointedout that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz wouldprobably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculouscharges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believethat anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even usefulapplications which come of this archive.

Good. Scientific research, especially old scientific research needs to be available to the public. If they must restrict access for a year or two to recoup some costs, then fine, but they should be freely available after that, and journals should never be run as a profit making enterprise.

You mean they should be free?.Well I guess you better tell that to all the science mags.

Either you're being sarcastic or you didn't understand what Xavin said.

He was saying make them available to paying subscribers or institutions for a period. After that make them available to the general public without charging $30+ for a single article. It's not that publishers can't make some money ever, that's not reasonable either.

Scientific discovery does no good if people can't access it. You're looking at a huge chunk of money when one needs to read dozens of articles for a research project. Not everyone has the luxury of being at a school with a well funded library system.

I believe that Xavin and roken are talking about two different types of publications: Xavin was speaking of journals where peer reviewed scientific studies are printed, and roken was speaking of science magazines such as Discovery and Scientific American. Though I could be completely wrong on this assumption.

When I read the subject I was ready to crap all over Swartz for handing his buddy a copy of these documents while claiming he gave everything back and no publishing would occur. What am I supposed to do now with all my righteous indignation?

I'm curious how the alleged 31 year old American Gregory Maxwell managed to come into possession of 18k+ old journal documents through "boring and lawful means." That's more than a couple evenings with a scanner and a stack of bound journals from the library, to be sure.

Can someone with access to the torrented file comment on the quality? Is it a pile of unmarked raw TIFFs, or carefully indexed, OCR'd HTML files with inline graphics or what?

As a graduate student IEEE's policies seem completely unfair and borderline immoral. I, with the help and supervision of my adviser, create a document detailing work I have done. I am compensated for this work by the funding agency, usually some branch of the US government, and then I sign over copyright to IEEE and my grant pays them on the order of $1000 in publishing fees.

The paper is reviewed by others in my field who do not receive a paycheck from IEEE and then posted online where IEEE charges very high subscription or per use fees.

I think that my work should not be subject to copyright but should instead be considered a work of the US government, they paid for it after all. But at the very least my institution or adviser should retain copyright. Where does all this money that IEEE receives go, and what have they done to deserve it?

++

The people of the US paid for it, the people of the US should own it. I don't see how allowing organizations to charge for access to research material that was funded by the public for years and years helps to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

++ as well

I don't necessarily believe that copyright interest should vest in the people of the United States necessarily -- the only way the research was produced was because of the intellectual prowess of the individual researchers, so the researchers should have some interest in the outcome. Though I do know in the area of patent law that university researchers tend not to get title to any patents they may make do to assignment agreements

However, I think we can all agree that the value-add of academic journals has declined substantially due to the Internet. Before, the mags were needed if you wanted to get your work out to an international audience; now the Internet can do the same thing, and the mags aren't paying people to do the peer review. But the journals still charge astronomical and usurious fees.

Seriously, peer-reviewed journals actually do employ people to, you know, work. Authors do have to spend money occasionally for stuff, like food. Librarians are not all pro bono because they make so much money they feel like giving back.

And you should know that peer reviewed journals do employ editors and copy-editors, often hire piece meal / freelance illustrators / artists, but they do not pay the authors, or the reviewers (I believe there may be a few exceptions with reviewers, but I don't know of any myself).

So the proceeds of the journal subscription becomes revenue for a privately owned (or publicly traded private) for-profit company, and does not fund any future or further research. They don't even so much as even pay to have a 3rd party re-run laboratory experiments to verify claims in an independent facility.

Libraries have nothing to do with it. In fact, they are the biggest victims, a post-secondary educational library spends a very large percentage of their annual budget on periodical subscriptions, or even more common and yet ever more transient nowadays - online subscriptions to such digital services, such that if they ever stop paying the subscriptions fees, they lose access to past and present articles from then on. With DRM, possibly even losing access to previously downloaded articles.

Gentle Ars readers and writers,There is so much sarcasm in these comments that I am confused and alienated. Maybe it's just me, andI know that this type of writing is in fashion, but that doesn't make it easy to understand or sympathize with. Quite the contrary, How about just rationally stating your case, please.Best Regards,Banjoboye

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we giveup some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange forcreating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy moreworks. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they usethreats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publiclyowned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Paywall publishers like JSTOR and IEEE are not sponsors of research. They are bloodsucking leeches of research.

That is correct. There is a lot of confusion in this thread. The authors of scientific research are not financed by the publishers. The overwhelming majority of them are actually paid by various governments (i.e. the tax payers of the world -- all of us). In fact, a lot of publishers actually charge the authors a fee for every article. Furthermore, peer-reviewers are likewise not paid by the publisher; they do this work as a service to the field.

The publishers are parasites: they collect all of the profits from publication without having done any actual research. They do select the articles to be published and match reviewers to articles, but the work required for that is utterly negligible compared to what is done by the researchers and reviewers. I've never understood why people don't get angry about this: after all, it's *your* money (paid in taxes) that finances the lion's share of the research, but you can't read the results without paying an absurd fee or belonging to an institution that pays said fee to somebody who did very little.

Incidentally, it doesn't have to be this way. There are fields for which any worthwhile article from the past 5 years (or maybe even 10 by now) is freely available to everyone. The governments of the world could easily make it so for all of science -- after all, they're the ones funding the research.

Yes, everything should be free. Including whatever the guy does for a living who dumped the documents. Seriously, peer-reviewed journals actually do employ people to, you know, work. Authors do have to spend money occasionally for stuff, like food. Librarians are not all pro bono because they make so much money they feel like giving back.

The way I'm reading this story, these are public domain documents. That means the authors and original publishers have already made the last dime they'll ever see from them. Some 3rd party repository is selling the public domain documents and making a profit, because they have them and can get away with doing so. I completely agree that content creators and producers need to be paid - and that's why we have copyright laws - but copyright and payment of artists isn't at issue in this particular case.

This is a respectable kind of activism. Public domain makes a very reasonable case for disseminating these materials, and he's owned up to it publicly as a statement. That sort of thought and courage are what (perhaps similarly intentioned, but) lesser groups like Anonymous are missing.

As a graduate student IEEE's policies seem completely unfair and borderline immoral. ... and then I sign over copyright to IEEE and my grant pays them on the order of $1000 in publishing fees.

++

I don't see how allowing organizations to charge for access to research material that was funded by the public for years and years helps to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

It formally started with Technology transfer[1], spurred on by the US Bayd-Dole Act[2], 1980.

To caw, I thought IEEE (and ACM) allowed authors to freely distribute their own works online[3], and I've never read the submissions guidelines expecting the authors needed to pay to publish in their journals as they have fairly large readerships - it does appear some IEEE journals have over-page count charges, i.e. for long articles.

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" was the first stated purpose of U.S. copyright as ratified in the U.S. Constitution in 1788. All the revisions of our copyright law, especially the most recent, have converted this previously limited right of authors "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" into a form of property ownership.

Knowledge and information will always strain to be free of the artificial bounds we place upon it. Freedom is within the very nature of a thing that can be freely given away and yet still retained